


A Two Body Problem, Solved

by Fuhadeza



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, because I wanted to write poems I guess?, catra is a poet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21882073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fuhadeza/pseuds/Fuhadeza
Summary: Adora accompanies Catra on a work trip and confronts some unexpected insecurities.Written for the She-Ra winter gift exchange!
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 58
Kudos: 371





	A Two Body Problem, Solved

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bow_woahh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bow_woahh/gifts).



> This is my fic for the She-Ra winter gift exchange! My recipient was bow-woahh, who requested modern AU hurt/comfort, neither of which I normally write much of, but I had fun! I decided to combine it with a trope (established relationship) I've seen almost none of in this fandom and really lean into the modern AU aspect. (It also, coincidentally, puts me over 100k total words of catradora fic! hooray.) Anyway, I hope you like it. :D

> _There’s something American-cool about Catra. Maybe it’s the pop star mononym, maybe it's the hair untamed by British propriety. It’s easy to imagine her in New York City, casually smoking a cigarette, leather jacket slung over one shoulder like a latter-day Patti Smith photographed by a latter-day Mapplethorpe._

Adora looks up from the newspaper. Catra is asleep in the seat across from her with only her scarf for a pillow—the one Adora got her for her twenty-eighth birthday. Or maybe her twenty-ninth. A decade in, the individual years don’t matter so much. Her breath is fogging the train window and, yes, her jacket is leather and her hair is unruly, but Adora knows that she doesn’t smoke and she doesn’t like New York and she looks as much a pop star as the overcast English landscape rushing by looks like the Bahamas.

Catra always bears the brunt of their jetlag. Adora leaves her be and returns to the interview, the one Catra gave the day before in just about the only two hours she’s spent awake since they touched down at Heathrow.

> _A critic described her Eliot Prize-winning collection_ Love Becomes a Habit _as “teen love poetry all grown up”. What is it, I ask, that bridges the gap between the angsty stereotype of teenage poetry and her own work? She replies so fast I wonder if she’s been waiting for someone to ask: ‘Happiness. There’s this idea that poets are all constantly tragic, like the only way to write a decent line of poetry is to have your heart broken every other week. And that’s bullshit. I wrote a lot of shit in my early twenties. I needed joy to really find my voice. To find the words I’d hidden from myself.’_

Which is when Adora realises that her left hand has formed a fist, crumpling the obverse page of the British daily she’s reading—when she realises that she is, for no reason she can identify, crying quietly in the empty first class carriage that, in other circumstances, neither of them would have paid for. It’s not that she hasn’t heard Catra talk about her work before. It’s not that she’s not used to seeing their relationship rendered obliquely in the sparse verse of Catra’s poetry. But everything has been— _bigger_ —since the Eliot Prize, and now they’re here, between time zones and between countries and between hotel suites Catra’s publisher is paying for, and she thinks about that phrasing, “all grown up”, and wonders if it’ll ever feel true of her, too.

There’s an excerpt from the book at the bottom of the interview, but Adora doesn’t read it. She’s read it before. She can recite it from memory. She doesn’t want to look, in case newsprint has transformed it into something unfamiliar.

She closes the newspaper, leans her head on the cold window, and greets the oncoming Scottish night.

*

**Where Do You Get Your Ideas?**

When I was young I took all the words I had  
in a big pile of dirty laundry  
and carried them down to the basement.  
I left them there,  
pickled in jars,  
bleached in the washer,  
swelling in the heat,  
until the door warped and burst and I found  
little prepositions all grown up  
verbs sharp enough to cut  
adjectives like river pebbles  
words that knew each other.  
You don’t need ideas when the words know each other.

*

Catra wakes up two minutes before the train pulls into Waverley. She blinks rapidly, winds her scarf around herself, and stretches awkwardly in her seat.

‘Are we there yet?’

Adora should find it cute. It should make her smile. But there's still that hitch in her thoughts, that little crumpled up ball of newspaper, and it's getting in the way of small pleasures.

‘Just about.’ She doesn’t think Catra has noticed. That's good—it’s probably nothing. Or else it's the stress of being somewhere new. She’ll feel better in the morning, when Edinburgh is more than a wash of lights in December darkness. New places are never real until she wakes up in them. ‘I'll get those,’ she adds, wrestling their carry-on suitcases to the ground. No amount of uncertainty can take away the couple inches she has on Catra. It feels good, being useful.

‘Coffee?’ Catra says when they step down to the platform. ‘I think I see a, what’s it called, you know, British Starbucks?’

‘Costa. Isn't it a bit late for coffee?’

‘It's not even five.’

‘Oh.’ Adora’s never been this far north before. It’s been dark for so long her body doesn’t know what to think. ‘Still. It’ll make your jetlag worse.’

Catra rolls her eyes. ‘I’ll get decaf.’

Adora buys the drinks. Decaf latte for Catra, herbal tea for her. The teabag wilts in her cup, painting water a pale imitation of real tea. Weren’t the British supposed to be good at tea? Maybe that was only England. She drinks it anyway, watching Catra navigate her notes around the sticky spot on their table.

‘What’re you doing?’

Catra looks up. Her latte has left a half-ring on the top sheet of paper, like some prop director’s idea of a writer’s manuscript. ‘Planning what to read tonight. We should probably head straight over.’

‘Oh! Right.’ It isn’t their first time at a literary festival, but it’s the first time with Catra well-known enough to merit such a packed schedule. Adora knows she has an event tonight—of course she does. She always plans their trips. ‘I’d say don’t read Because I Hate You.’

‘What, you think I can’t make dictionary entries fun?’

Catra smirks at her, and it’s the half-challenging, half-flirtatious look that drove a younger Adora up the wall trying to figure her out. She breathes through the tightness in her chest, focuses on the way that look still makes her feel, always, a decade later. _I love her_. That’s not in doubt—she only wishes she knew what was.

‘I think the Scottish public might object to Merriam-Webster. There’s a different dictionary rules these lands.’

Catra snorts and sprays coffee all over her pages, ruining the phantom prop director’s careful work. ‘You think anyone’s started a war over a dictionary before?’

‘At least a dozen. You know how many wars they’ve had here?’

‘Ugh. Never mind, then. I’d hate to be _derivative_.’

The way Catra says it, all puffed up and pretentious, makes Adora laugh. _Derivative_ is the insult favoured by people who turn their nose up at Catra’s poetry.

‘You know,’ Catra goes on, ‘we can stop by the hotel, if you like. You don’t have to come with me.’

‘No.’ Adora smiles, and for a moment everything is perfect. ‘No, I want to watch you seduce some Scots.’

*

**The First Time I Kiss You It’s Because I Hate You**

And I want to fuck with you  
And I want to kill that preposition  
And I want to write a poem just like this,  
A poem that proves the rule.  
(The rule is—I hate you.)  
A year later I make a discovery:  


_to prove_ , Merriam-Webster, sense 3c: _to check the correctness of_

And I’ll argue with the dictionary  
And I’ll write this poem,  
The poem that proves the rule.  


_to prove_ , Merriam-Webster, sense 1a: _to establish the existence, truth, or validity of_

(The rule is—I love you.)

*

Catra takes her advice.

The dictionary entries stay on the page. The poems she reads instead are short, sharp things and in between she chats to her audience, tells them anecdotes Adora has heard a hundred times before, anecdotes that, more often than not, feature Adora herself.

Catra never mentions her name. It doesn’t take much for a careful reader to look at Catra’s poetry and see the progression, bitter-bittersweet-sweet, and conclude the poems are all about the same person; but it’s the plausible deniability, the one degree of separation, that makes it work for them. No one in the audience _knows_ that when Catra talks of the misdirected anger of her youth, the woman it was aimed at is standing right there, behind them, smiling. That was a rule they agreed, mutually, back in the days when Catra’s biggest audience fit into half their living room.

Half their living room has swollen to the size of a bookstore, the little shelves they keep their knick-knacks on replaced by the Reference section on the left and Fiction, A through K, on the right. In between is an audience so large Adora cannot immediately estimate their number.

And on stage, laughing and beautiful and free—

 _It wasn’t supposed to be like this_ , Adora thinks idly. _She was supposed to need me_.

She trips over the thought, reaches out to steady herself, only this time it’s not enough: the thought is deeper than she realises and she’s falling headfirst into the pit, the one she’s been digging all unawares ever since the taxi arrived to take them to the airport. It _hurts_ to see Catra like this, to wonder what would be different if she herself weren’t there, and come up with nothing. _You don’t have to come with me_.

Adora blinks. _What am I_ thinking? It’s not fair—she’s not being fair to Catra, and she finds she can’t be there any more, can’t be in the same room as Catra, and before she quite knows what she’s doing she’s pushing the heat-fogged door open and stumbling into the dark. Princes Street is a conglomeration of Gothic architecture and wet surfaces reflecting street light, but she looked up the hotel ahead of time, she knows where to go, and the thoughts chase her down the streets,

 _What happened, Adora?_ when she splashes through an intersection too late and a car honks at her,

 _You were going to be a firefighter, a doctor, a therapist,_ when the cold metal railing of a staircase bites into her palms,

 _You were going to be someone who helped people. Someone people relied on_ , when she turns a corner too fast and nearly slips on the cobblestones,

 _Who needs you now?_ when the hotel appears in front of her, the letters spelling its name barely visible on the side of the building,

_What is the point of you?_

*

**Self Portrait with Cat Ears**

When I had my picture painted I asked the portraitist  
to show me as I really am.  
It hung on the wall for years, unlooked at  
because I already knew I had horns, a forked tail, slit pupils;  
until the day I invited you in and you said how beautiful I looked  
as a cat  
how lustrous was my fur, how bright my eyes  
how elegant my unforked tail and pointed ears.

Yes, I said:  
But I was right about the pupils.

*

The hotel lobby is uncomfortably ornate. The woman at the check-in desk sets her at ease—nothing like a Scottish accent to cut through the formality—but then she’s frowning and handing back Adora’s ID, and Adora knows what the problem is even before she says it. Of course she isn’t in the system—of course the booking is under Catra’s name.

‘Okay,’ she says, and it’s mortifying the way her voice trembles. ‘Can I just—wait in the lobby, or—’

Adora knows Catra is there a moment before she slides her arm around Adora’s waist and squeezes, once, and her breath catches in her throat as Catra hands over her own ID and says, ‘It’ll be under my name.’

It’s not unusual. Catra is subtly but freely affectionate in public, and in other circumstances the little display of possessiveness would have made Adora feel secure. Now—

‘Shouldn’t you be at the bookstore?’ she says accusingly when the elevator doors slide shut behind them.

Catra glances at her in surprise. ‘I saw you leave. I was nearly done, anyway. I thought you might need me—’

‘I don’t! I can handle myself.’ Adora turns away, the better to hide the way her face burns with the knowledge that she couldn’t even get into their hotel room on her own. Catra stares at her for a moment, but before she can reply the doors open again. ‘Come on,’ Adora says, snatching the keycard from Catra’s hand. ‘This way.’

The room is small but well-appointed, like something from the start of the previous century. The view will be gorgeous come morning, Adora can tell, but at that moment she’s had enough of the dark and the rain and the city lights, and she draws the curtains closed more aggressively than she needs to.

‘Adora?’ Catra is sitting on the bed, jacket and boots discarded by the door.

‘What?’

‘Something’s been bothering you since we got off the train.’

That gives Adora pause. She hadn’t—she hadn’t noticed Catra noticing.

‘I’m sorry,’ Catra goes on, ‘for following you. I just—’

‘You just _what_?’

‘I want you to tell me what’s going on, okay? Not—run off into an unfamiliar city at night. That’s—’ She laughs. ‘Well, that’s something _I_ would have done. Don’t be me. Please?’

A younger Catra might have been stubborn enough to ignore that plea. Adora isn’t, and never was.

She sits down next to Catra. Wets her lips. Sighs. When she starts talking, she doesn’t stop. There’s so much to say, like every sentence sparks more revelations in her: _My life isn’t like I imagined it would be. I feel like you’re overshadowing me. I feel like you don’t need me anymore._ By the time she’s done, she’s crying freely, more than she’s cried in years. She sniffs, wipes her nose, clears her throat—and having run out of excuses to stall, voices the final, deepest fear: ‘I’m afraid you’re with me out of habit.’

She’s not sure when Catra puts her arm around her. Not sure when she makes the decision to hide her face in Catra’s shoulder—but there it is, the worn cotton of one of Catra’s old t-shirts soaking up her tears. She feels dizzy, displaced, the memory of a dozen moments just like this one turned on its head. I’m _supposed to be helping_ her—but she shoves the thought back down. It’s in the open, now. It can’t haunt her.

‘I’m going to tell you the same thing I needed to hear, back then,’ Catra murmurs. ‘It’s this: you’re a part of every future I imagine for myself. That was true ten years ago, and five years ago, and it’s true now.’

Adora’s hand forms a fist around the hem of Catra’s shirt. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’ Catra strokes her head, freeing her hair from a ponytail that’s already half undone. ‘I figured that went without saying, but I guess that’s no reason not to say it. And I will. Whenever you need to hear it.’

Adora swallows another sob down. It’s embarrassing—she’s getting snot all over Catra. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘This isn’t—I’m not supposed to be—’

‘ _Adora_. Stop. Forget what you’re supposed to be and think about what you are. Isn’t that what you always told me?’

Catra’s hand is on her back now, dissolving the tension pooled between her shoulder blades. She twists to give Catra better access. ‘Yes.’

‘Let me take care of you, okay? It’s okay to take, sometimes. I’m so grateful for everything you’ve ever given me, but you can relax now. Let me give you something, too.’

Adora sighs into the bedspread. Catra’s voice has a cadence to it, a rhythm in tune with her fingers massaging Adora’s back. ‘I’m sorry—’ she bites the words back before Catra can object. ‘No, I mean—I mean—thank you?’

Adora can hear the smile in her voice when Catra says, ‘You’re welcome,’ and she smiles, too, even though Catra can’t see it, and relaxes into the massage, and the things that were bothering her are still there, still present, but now there’s a safety net back in place, now there’s the guarantee of Catra’s love should she slip again.

Presently Catra says, ‘You know why I like doing this so much, right? Not just the writing, I mean, the publicity and everything?’

It’s not a question they’ve ever discussed before, not explicitly, but Adora knows the answer. She knows the answer because she knows Catra.

‘You spent so long being afraid to share yourself,’ Adora says quietly. ‘Now it’s cathartic.’

‘Right. And—’ Catra’s eyes focus on a point behind Adora and she says: ‘Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. You recognise that?’

‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines?’ Adora translates. ‘That’s not one of yours.’

Catra snorts. ‘No, it’s not. It’s from a poem I was obsessed with for a while. When—you know.’ When they thought they hated each other. ‘And that line, it’s still—well. I couldn’t write without you. Not the dark stuff, not the happy stuff. I need you, Adora. I’d never be brave enough to do this on my own.’

‘Come on, you know that’s not—’

‘No, it _is_ true. And it’s not—it would be fine if it wasn’t, you know? I love you so much, and I don’t have to _need_ you for that to be true. But I do.’

Adora rolls onto her back. Catra looks as normal as she ever does: a little tired, hair a comprehensive mess, mismatched eyes reflecting more light than they really should. ‘You’re beautiful.’

Catra smirks. ‘I know.’

‘I don’t want to take you for granted,’ Adora says. She reaches up and, ignoring Catra’s noise of protest, pulls her down to eye level. She brushes her lips against the steady beat of Catra’s pulse. ‘Ever.’

‘I know,’ Catra says again, but this time her voice is naked. More real. ‘And you know—I get what you mean. About our life not being what you expected. Me too.’

‘Yeah?’

Catra kisses the top of her head. ‘Yeah. You helped me work out what I wanted to do with my life. And it took _years_. And I promise that I’ll help you do that, too. Even if takes twice as long. Even if takes the rest of our lives. I promise.’

Adora is suddenly glad her face is buried in the crook of Catra’s shoulder. She waits for the flush suffusing her cheeks to fade. ‘You know, I was thinking maybe I’d take a shot at the whole poet thing, too.’

‘Oh yeah?’

Adora clears her throat. ‘Tonight I can write the gladdest lines.’

‘Mm. Don’t quit your day job.’

‘ _Hey!_ ’

‘I’m just saying: “gladdest”?’

‘It’s not my fault “happiest” doesn’t scan.’ Adora sticks her tongue out, but she’s smiling, she can’t stop smiling, and it’s making indignation difficult. ‘Weren’t you being supportive?’

‘If you wanted straightforward support, you should’ve married someone else. Mine comes with a side of mockery.’

Adora sighs, dramatically. It feels good to return to old grooves. Familiar, but not taken for granted. ‘I didn’t,’ she says. ‘Marry you, I mean.’

‘Hm. True. You wanna fix that?’

Grooves shift. It takes Adora a few seconds to comprehend what Catra is suggesting. ‘But,’ she says, and her heart is beating faster than it ought, ‘I thought you—I thought you didn’t like the idea—’

‘I guess age has mellowed me.’ No matter how hard Adora tries to find the joke, Catra’s expression is perfectly sincere. ‘Besides, back then I still cared a lot about what other people would think of us. I had _principles_. Now I think maybe what you want is more important.’

Adora kisses her, like she’s done a thousand times before and she’ll do a thousand times again, and Catra’s lips on hers are the first birdcall of spring, always the same but new each year; she tastes like winter, like bright clear air and a subpar stationside latte. Catra stretches the kiss out, long and slow and languid, and when Adora finally pulls away, Catra’s hand on her cheek and Catra’s breath in her lungs and Catra’s body feline-lithe against hers, all she can say through the haze of tears obscuring her vision is, ‘I love you.’

Catra is grinning: a little smug, a little smitten. ‘How about it, princess?’

The pet name makes Adora shiver. ‘Okay,’ she manages to get out. ‘Yes. Okay. Yes. _Yes_.’

*

Some time later, Catra says her name, sleepy and muffled against her neck.

‘Mm?’

‘What you said about habit. You know how I feel about that, right?’

‘Yeah. I do.’

‘Okay. Okay, good.’ Catra shifts, makes herself comfortable against Adora’s back. ‘It’s just—there’s a reason I chose that poem for the title.’

Adora pulls Catra’s arm tighter around herself and kisses her knuckles. ‘I know,’ she whispers. ‘It’s okay. Go back to sleep.’

Catra mumbles an _I love you_. Two minutes later she’s asleep again, snoring in that soft, constant way that sounds almost like a purr. Adora remains awake a few minutes more: Catra’s copy of the book is on the bedstand, and Adora knows it almost as well as Catra does, certainly well enough for the title to summon the lines that follow, for the words— _Catra’s_ words—to stream through her mind and arrange themselves in calming rows, and the last thing she remembers before sleep takes her is an image of embossed gold letters glinting on the spine:

**Love Becomes a Habit**

Rules for living in it:  
Focus on the tongue in your mouth.  
Be conscious of every breath.  
Prod every ache and scratch every itch.  
Follow them, and  
Habit is not the death of love:  
It is the momentum left over when rocket boosters fall away;  
It is the thrusters that push me into orbit. It is  
gravity; and we  
are a two body problem,  
solved.

**Author's Note:**

> To answer the burning question on everyone's mind: why _not_ Edinburgh? Also about 2.5k words into this, I was like, shit, maybe I was supposed to make it explicitly festive. So, uh, sorry about that. It's at least set in December?
> 
> and as always, let me know what y'all thought! I love hearing from readers, especially when it's something a bit different to what I usually write. :)


End file.
